Latinx Data: Historical Civil Rights Advocacy and Contemporary Intersectional Insights

9:00am-10:15am EST

Description

This session will feature keynote lectures by scholars Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, author of Figures of the Future: Latino Civil Rights and the Politics of Demographic Change (Princeton University Press, 2021) and Amalia Z. Dache, lead editor of Rise Up! Activism as Education (Michigan State University Press, 2019). Presenters will talk about the complexities of data and the Latinx community, the contemporary challenges regarding inequitable Latinx data representation, and the ways the Latinx community has created and used data as advocacy. Michaels’ talk, “Data, Demographics, and the Making of National Latino Civil Rights Advocacy” will provide historical overview of data-driven group advocacy that has contributed to social change for Latinx communities in the United States. Amalia’s talk, “Cartographies of Afrolatinidad: Limits and Possibilities” will explore the limitations and possibilities of using publicly available data to understand the social conditions of AfroLatinx and Afro-Latin American populations in the U.S. The event is part of the University of Pittsburgh’s Year of Data and Society intended to help us think critically about the data we collect, use, and leave behind through our scholarly work, institutional operations, and digital lives. This critical conversation is important as we think about how the Hispanic/Latinx community is demographically complex and data are inadequate for accounting for the needs of such a diverse ethnoracial group.